Snakes and the City

Some say it’s dangerous to raise kids in New York City, but, aside from an occasional close encounter with the edge of a subway platform, my family has never confronted any serious threats. But, after a few years in town, my wife and I decided to expose our two young children to life in a different environment. We bought a second home, in the woods of Orange County, and began spending our summers in the wild, but it didn’t take long for all of us to learn that the forest is full of dangers. Brawling animals woke us up on our first night in the house. A few days later, we found an enormous bird’s wing near our front door. The next month, a large black bear passed a few yards away from the picnic table at which I was writing. Soon after that, our neighbors warned us about the local Lyme disease epidemic and asked us to allow hunters to shoot deer in our meadow. And, by the way, had we heard about the rattlesnakes? They were everywhere.

Over the past few summers, we’ve all learned to manage the risks of country living. We can identify poison ivy. We lock down the garbage. We use lots of bug spray and do nightly tick checks. We even occasionally pull ticks off ourselves with tweezers. This year, my wife had a lot of work to do before Labor Day, so she returned to the city by train over the weekend and left the kids and me to spend the final days of summer on our own. When Monday afternoon arrived, we grudgingly opened the doors of our station wagon and slowly, painfully packed it to the roof with clothes, books, and countless bags of food. I could hardly see out the back window. I pulled out of the driveway and headed back to the city.

We’d travelled less than a mile down the road when my five-year-old daughter started thrashing around the back seat and screaming, “Snake! Snake! Snake!” A second later, my eight-year-old boy joined in. I slammed on the brakes and looked back, but all I could see were the kids, terrified, frantically trying to take off their seat belts. I jumped out of the car, scrambled to one of the rear doors, and pulled them onto the road, instructing them to sit on a stone wall about fifty feet away. I returned to the car and looked around but couldn’t see a snake.

“What did it look like?” I called out.

“It was black,” my son screamed.

“It had green,” said my daughter, who was still shaking.

“How big was it?” I asked. They both stretched their arms as far as they could.

“Did you hear a rattle?”

They looked at each other, puzzled, then looked blankly at me. How could anyone hear anything beneath those screams?

I looked back at the loaded car and thought about all of the places the snake could be hiding. I realized that I’d have to remove items until the snake was visible. Since I didn’t know whether the snake was venomous, each lifting of a bag would feel like a turn of Russian roulette.

But what could I do? I found a long stick in the woods and poked around the bags and under the seats. Nothing. Fearfully, tentatively, I reached my bare hand into the car and began pulling out our belongings. The large suitcases in the back were easy. But the open grocery bags I’d crammed onto the floor? Wrapping my fingers around the handles made me tremble, and lifting them, one by one, was self-induced torture.

A runner stopped by to see what I was doing. He didn’t know much about snakes, either, except that there were poisonous ones around. Still, he helped me get the bags out, fold the seats down, and even remove the floor mats. Soon the whole car was empty, but the snake was nowhere in sight. He wished us luck and jogged away.

City life doesn’t teach you how to deal with this kind of situation. So I did what came naturally: I called the police. Five minutes later, an officer arrived. “We have lots of rattlers around here,” he said, “and the little ones are the most dangerous. We get calls about snakes all the time, but not like this call.”

Dressed for the occasion, in long leather gloves and a bulletproof vest, the officer worked his hands through the vehicle and shined his flashlight into every crevasse, but he couldn’t find anything. “These snakes are fast, and they don’t want to be caught inside,” he told me. “I’m pretty sure it slithered out when you opened the doors.”

His report comforted me but didn’t persuade my children. My daughter refused to get back in the car. But the officer looked her straight in the eye and said, kindly, “Honey, my job is to protect you, and I promise that the snake isn’t in your car anymore. He’s scared of you, too, and he went back into the woods.”

That, plus an iPad and another long wooden stick, was enough to get her buckled in.

The officer helped me pack the car, shook my hand, and wished me a good Labor Day. We got back on the road.

This time I spun around fast enough to see the long, surprisingly thick black snake writhing around the back seat while my kids bent and twirled and kicked to escape their booster seats. I pulled over, leaped out, unbuckled the kids, and helped them out of the car again. They were terrified, and my daughter was weeping. Within seconds, another police officer drove by and I flagged him down. “I thought the other officer got rid of that snake,” he said. “Guess not.”

He moved the kids back from the road and into the tall grass, where the deer ticks live. “Stay here,” he said, “where it’s safe.”

We found the snake right away. It was three or four feet long, black, mostly, but without green stripes, and the officer said that it was probably harmless. Only then did I begin to feel relief. The snake was on the back seat, and we used my daughter’s stick to lift it toward the window. We all watched as the snake worked its way up, out, and into the woods.

The officer flashed a proud smile and turned to tell the kids that everything was O.K. My son said thank you, but my daughter wasn’t buying it. “I’m not going back in the car!” she said, clinging to me. “I don’t want to go back!” She wasn’t merely shaken. She was also convinced that the first snake she saw, the one with the black and green, was still in the car, and she didn’t believe the officer when he said that that was impossible. “We have to get back to Manhattan,” I told her. “Only if we walk,” she replied, without missing a beat.

My son, at this point, was done with the drama. He was already in his booster seat, reading “Harry Potter,” so I asked him, “Would you mind letting your sister sit in your seat, so that she can be on the side of the car where the snake doesn’t like to go?” He nodded in agreement. Then I turned to my daughter, and, amazingly, she accepted the arrangement, as long as we promised to close the windows and keep her away from “the garden side” of the road. Off we went.

A few miles later, we were on the highway, heading back to the comforts of Manhattan. My daughter poked the floor every couple of minutes with her stick and made a rattling sound, then told us that we shouldn’t worry. She was only playing, and we were almost out of the woods. “Let’s just not talk about the snake anymore,” she kept saying, while my son and I sat in silence. “But thank goodness they don’t live in New York City.”

Eric Klinenberg (@ericklinenberg) is a professor of sociology and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.

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